Gandhian nuclear physicist warns against using nuclear energy to generate electricity

The Department of Atomic Energy is prone to making exaggerated
claims about nuclear energy, says Dr. Surendra Gadekar at the last meeting

Throw away your geysers, immersion rods and other electric appliances; instead, burn some wood between three bricks for a hot bath. It's a more efficient way of heating water

When the Prime Minister states that nuclear energy is both necessary and essential to meet the country.s needs, treat his assertions with scepticism.

.India.s Department of Atomic Energy has a history of making absurd projections and not meeting even onetenth of them. Dr. Bhabha predicted in 1962 that in 25 years India would have 20,000 to 25,000 MW of nuclear energy. But in 1987 the actual capacity was only 1,200 MW..

These are some of the points that the guest speaker at the last meeting, nuclear physicist and Gandhian Dr. Surendra Gadekar, made in the course of his talk on .Is nuclear energy a sensible option for India to meet its future energy needs?.

A graduate of IIT, Kharagpur, and post-graduate from IIT, Kanpur, he did his post-doctoral fellowship from Iowa State University, USA. He worked with the Indian Institute of Science for two years and later joined the Sampoorna Kranti Vidyalaya at Vedchhi, a small tribal village in South Gujarat. He publishes Anu Mukti, South Asia.s only anti-nuclear magazine.

Dr. Gadekar made several interesting points in his talk and the questionanswer session that followed. He said the rural areas of Maharashtra had almost ten hours of power cut. But not Bombay. Why did the city not suffer a power-cut? .Why is electricity not kept where it is produced?.

This was because of the centralisation of the power sector. The people involved had no choice under this scheme of things. But once cheaper, quicker and more efficient means of generating electricity were found and once decentralisation was achieved, things would be different.

.They have no choice now. This is true across the board, therefore politicians, bureaucrats and everybody else prefers the centralised option..

The burden of Dr. Gadekar.s talk was that nuclear energy would achieve little apart from causing a colossal waste of natural resources and would precipitate unprecedented global warming.

He started by stating that the Prime Minister.s assertion about nuclear energy being both necessary and essential to meet energy needs had to be .treated with some degree of scepticism ..

First of all, nuclear technology was a dual-use technology, with both weapon as well as energy connotations. But ideally, the question of energy had to be looked at as one would view any other electricity-producing technology. There was no point mixing the weapons part while evaluating it.

.One can argue about whether India should have nuclear weapons for its security. but even if one argues that India does need nuclear weapons, the amount of nuclear waste already produced in the last 50 years is more than enough for any realistic weapons requirements. Therefore, we should look at nuclear energy as we would at any other electricity-producing technology..

Secondly, electricity and energy were not synonymous. The Ministry of Power dealt only with electricity, not other forms of energy. But even in developed countries the electricity penetration of the economy was less than 30%.

Dr. Gadekar said nuclear energy that could produce only electricity could at best meet about 25 to 30% of the country.s primary energy needs. An important question was: .Is nuclear energy a good option also for just producing electricity?.

Dr. Surendra Gadekar with First Lady Pervin Jehangir and
Suresh Lulla, who introduced him to the members

Another point to ponder was the fact that India had almost no uranium. Indian ore yielded 0.02 or 0.03% (one tonne of ore giving 200 to 300 grams of uranium). Even for the existing reactors, India had to import uranium. But future import of uranium would only come with imported technology.

.So when we talk about nuclear energy, as the Prime Minister has been doing, we have to ask, do we produce electricity using imported technology? For then the costs are going to be based on imported uranium, not on what we have been doing so far..

Turning his ire next on the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Dr. Gadekar said it had .a history of making absurd projections and not meeting even one-tenth of those.. Dr. Bhabha had predicted in 1962 that in 25 years India would have 20,000 to 25,000 MW of nuclear energy. But in 1987 the actual capacity was only about 1,200 MW.

When the DAE claimed that nuclear energy could produce large amounts of electricity, it was referring to a completely different technology, based on breeder reactors and thorium technology . but this had not been successfully demonstrated anywhere in the world.

Besides, this was a far more expensive technology than the one in use today. And since the success of the technology had not yet been demonstrated, it was likely that the nuclear establishment would hide behind the fig-leaf of .teething troubles., as it had been wont to do for a long time.

More than anything else, Dr. Gadekar said, nuclear energy was the only electricity-producing technology with unique risks that no other electricityproducing technology carried.

One of these was the risk of catastrophic accidents, such as the ones at Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island and so on; even in India, .we have been lucky because we have come very close to some very big disasters, such as the fire at Narora, the flooding at Kakrapada, the collapse of the Kaiga dome..

At the same time, nuclear energy was the only technology where the waste could be used to produce .horrendous . weapons. In this era of terrorism, nuclear plants could be a tempting target for attack . something unlikely with other technologies.

Finally, the .unsolved, and probably unsolvable,. problem of nuclear waste: Nuclear energy produced tonnes of waste which would .have to be kept away from the environment for thousands or millions of years; nobody, even after 50 or 60 years of hard work, has come up with any kind of solution. (to this problem).

Dr. Gadekar said he would focus on the costs involved . both capital as well as human . in nuclear energy. He would show that nuclear energy was the most expensive option.

Apart from the capital, fuel and other costs, there were also the environmental and health costs which were not counted by anybody.

The fuel costs in the nuclear system were low (one did not need too much uranium) but the capital costs were high. In fact, according to a paper in Economic and Political Weekly, the capital cost of a nuclear plant was very high compared to a coal plant.

Over the years, the DAE had always shown low costs . but the actual cost was sometimes two to three times higher. This happened in the West, too. The only nuclear reactor based on western technology was the one being built in Finland. Its estimated cost was $3,000 per KW but in just two years it had gone up to $4,500 per KW.

If India imported uranium and technology, then the cost would go up to the same figure of $4,500 per KW. In other words, Dr. Gadekar said, the promoters of nuclear power gave low initial estimates; but by the time the project got underway or neared completion, the actual costs doubled or even tripled.

The speaker then turned to the health of people living near nuclear facilities. He showed slides depicting the rise in the incidence of deformities since the setting up of the Atomic Power Project at Rawatbhata, 50 km. from Kota in Rajasthan.

Not only deformities, even the number of miscarriages and stillbirths and the incidence of congenital deformities had gone up. People living near the project had to pay a heavy price in terms of health and longevity . they had cataracts at the age of 15 and the median age of death had gone down by ten years.

So what was the alternative? Dr. Gadekar said over the past 15 years wind energy had become more economical than nuclear energy though it got more government support.

The US Department of Energy had reported a big fall in the cost of generating and distributing solar energy through photovoltaic cells. From the current level of 18 to 23 cents per KW/hour, it could fall to about five to ten cents per KW/hour by 2015.

.No nuclear reactor, if we try to build one today, is going to be completed before 2015. And its cost will be more than the cost of solar energy plants..

There were other alternatives, if only one was more imaginative. For example, the .problem. weed waterhyacinth, which was choking rivers and pumps. If one looked at it in another way, then water-hyacinth had the capacity of producing 250 tonnes of biomass per hectare, biomass that could be converted into liquid fuel.

.So if we are talking about things like global warming (and that.s what nuclear energy has been touted as a solution for), then I think there are far more sensible solutions which can actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than going in for a very costly option. (such as nuclear energy), Dr. Gadekar concluded.

Answering questions, he told PDG Manibhai Doshi that not only Dr. Bhabha, even Dr. Srinivasan (one of his successors) had predicted that in a few years nuclear power would be cheaper than coal.

Since then, the scenario had changed. The Nuclear Power Corporation claimed that nuclear power would be comparable to power from coal if coal had to be transported 1,200 km. from a coalfield. .But my point is that the cost of nuclear power being touted is all wrong. There are huge subsidies..

For example, Indian reactors used heavy water and wasted a huge amount of this expensive commodity. The cost of heavy water was not easy to establish because it was not published. But according to a fairly good guess, it could be in the region of Rs. 25,000 per kg.

But each reactor lost about seven tonnes of heavy water every year due to leakages and other factors. The subsidy on this account alone was about Rs. 12,000 per kg. This meant that a sum of Rs. 100 to Rs. 150 crores was simply not counted in the cost.

Kamal Bulchandani noted that the dictum, .the greater the risk, the greater the gain., applied to a country as well, .the greater the price, the faster the development.. Wouldn.t retreating from nuclear energy to coal put the country back into the bullockcart age from the jet age?

Dr. Gadekar said jets and nuclear energy were born around the same time 50 years ago. Therefore, it couldn.t be said that nuclear energy was a modern technology. It was modern when compared to coal, .but that.s not saying very much..

But the moot point was that there were cheaper alternatives that could be explored before trying more expensive nuclear energy. He also recalled that in the 1940.s it was suggested that India had to go for nuclear energy lest it missed the bus and lost its Independence.

Now, Dr. Gadekar added, 60 years had passed since Independence and there was no fear of losing it. Besides, .we have already mastered what there was to master. so we should now look at technologies purely as technologies (and ask), does it produce electricity and at what cost? Since this (nuclear) is the costliest of all we should first choose cheaper ones.

One member wanted to know which country had harnessed solar energy profitably and whether solar energy in that country was still subsidised.

Dr. Gadekar had no clear-cut answer. But he said .a lot of our needs can be met without going through electricity... Let me give an example..

All that was needed for a hot bath was to burn some wood between three bricks. This was an extremely efficient way of raising the temperature of water by 15 to 20 degrees.

Instead of this, people used geysers and immersion rods which consumed electricity. How was electricity produced? By raising the temperature of water in a power plant to 500 or 600 degrees and turning it into steam to run turbines. That produced electricity . which was transmitted into homes after a transmission and distribution loss of 25 to 30%.

.The lifestyle choices that we make need to be looked at for the amount of waste involved. So, the cheapest would be conservation, the next cheapest will be the different options, the renewable sources of energy..

Coal was cheap and solar energy converted into electricity was far more expensive. .I am not in favour of coal either. what I am saying is that we need to go about it far more sensibly than we are doing right now..

In reply to a question by Shailesh Haribhakti, Dr. Gadekar said a comparison of the costs of nuclear versus solar power was hampered by the fact that the numbers for nuclear power were .primarily a hoax of the nuclear energy people.. He repeated the story of the nuclear reactor coming up in Finland, the cost of which had doubled before completion.

Burjor Poonawala wondered why the US was anxious to sell nuclear plants to India and did this not fly in the face of the Americans. desire to reduce nuclear proliferation?

Dr. Gadekar said the multi-billiondollar nuclear plant-building industry in the West was .already dead.. The only orders it was getting were from China, India and South Korea.

As for American concerns about proliferation, these were somewhat dubious. They .shouted a lot. about proliferation but if money was to be made, they gave up their proliferation concerns. This had become clear in the case of China against which sanctions were imposed after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Finally, Dr. Gadekar said he favoured alternative (and renewable) sources of electricity generation.

Suresh Lulla introduced the guest speaker, while the vote of thanks was proposed by Pankaj Baliga. .